like punching in a dream
by Devi Lethe
Summary: "She dreams of ages, and eternities, and hell. It must be a hell, because how else could they all have become such horrors? She goes mad without a single witness, dozens of times over. So do they."
1. Chapter 1

_If it falls apart, I would surely wake it_  
_Bright lights turn me clean_  
_This is worse than it seems_

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She dreams. Or at least she thinks she does - sometimes. She dreams of the night Esther's children sent her up in flames. The fire licks, dances, and then destroys. She can't breathe…

No, not that. That was not a dream. That was real.

She dreamed Elijah wrapped his arms around her, held her beside a fire, made love to her and then climbed inside her to fill the hole in her heart, and that - that was a dream. It could have been real once, if she had chosen. But the fire… that was all too true.

Sometimes she dreams of Esther, and isn't sure she dreams alone. The grass is too real, too rich under her hands, the soil too ripe. Esther remembers.

Tatia can see herself in a field beside Niklaus. They're young, but not so young. He's smiling, watching her, and she looks… uncertain. There's doubt in her eyes beside the smile on her lips and she wonders that he can't see it himself, but then, he never could. His love was true.

Esther says, "I'm sorry. I never meant for you to live."

She thinks, "I never wanted to die..."

It's not enough. Not for any of them.

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She remembers when her heart burst open. It's happened twice. The first time was an ecstasy of rain, heavy and pouring from the heavens, soaking into her skin, her flesh, threading through her pores until it reached the quick of her.

And then she had grown – oh, how it _ached_ - sprouting, tearing open her own skin just to stretch out a green hand to the joyous sky.

The second was through a fugue of pain, agony unimaginable. Blood and sweat and tears and hope and hate and a piece of her soul gone forever. Lost.

She dreams of a day when her branches will reach high enough, far enough, to touch that miraculous blue. And of a day when she will hold tight enough, be strong enough, to take back that fragment of herself, to hold it in, where only she can ever reach it. A place inside, safe from the monsters.

But then she remembers that even that isn't safe. They can even get you there.

She should know. They still have her.

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Nik comes to see her sometimes. Or at least, she thinks he does. She can smell him, feel the air move as he comes closer. She can feel the heat on his skin, hear the rhythm of his heart. A monster's rhythm. Or is he a monster? He might not be yet. That comes later, she thinks. It's not then. Not yet.

Cool hands brush the hair back from her face, and she's sure – almost completely – that it's really him, the boy who loved her. He sits beside her, and she listens to his heart, because they'd long since closed her eyes, and she wonders whatever happened to that boy.

Sometimes he stays a while, and sometimes seconds only. He'll stroke her hair, hold her hand. Guilt, she thinks, but can't be sure. She's never sure of anything. Not then. Not now.

She thinks, "Isn't anything real?"

The answer gazes back at her in Esther's eyes.

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Sometimes she dreams of them, and she wants to believe it's not real. She dreams of blood and hate and anger and fear and a joy that sickens her to her very core. That makes her want to rend her skin, to rip off her leaves and gouge out her eyes and bury herself forever in the dark of the earth.

Even Elijah, with his high morals and firm belief, even he gives in to their monstrosity.

Niklaus is in Rome with Rebekah, and they have a party. Esther is there. Esther is always there, when she dreams of them. And when they take turns feeding on a slave girl, Esther looks and says, "They're your children, too."

All Tatia can think is, "You gave them to me…"

She has dozens of children. They grew from her, fell from her, were torn from her. She bled for them, in red and in thick beads of yellow.

She thinks, "I didn't want this…"

And something in her answers, "Neither did they."

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She remembers a day, or she thinks she does, when they stood over her. Esther and their sons, and Elijah asked, "Why won't she wake?"

Esther said, "The spirits say she is trapped. Caught between life and death."

"But we are, too, aren't we?" The despair in Nik's voice was heart wrenching.

"This is not the same, Niklaus. She was not the target of the spell, she was a catalyst. Something is keeping her here."

"What does Ayanna say?" Elijah took one of her hands in his, and she had shrieked into the void, struggling to do anything, move anything. It was before she had gone so far into madness that she no longer knew despair.

"Ayanna says it is the will to live."

How wrong they were. How foolish. When they pressed their lips to hers, whispered lies, truths, meaningless nothings, all in the hopes that one of them could call her forth, summon her from the ashes.

How stupid she was to think she had any power left. She can't unfurl a single leaf. How could she ever will herself to live?

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She dreams of ages, and eternities, and hell. It must be a hell, because how else could they all have become such horrors?

She goes mad without a single witness, dozens of times over. So do they.

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She dreams of Elijah, caught in the space between living and dying. Her ash in his heart next to the steel holds him down like drought. She's half way certain it's not a dream, or if it, it must belong to them both, because they lay in a near darkness she's never seen.

His soul hovers and he dreams of her, her face. He dreams of the scent on her skin and the heat of her, wet and slick as he pushes her down, pushes in. Tatia is there, real and alive under his hands, panting and sweating and her sap pounding and oh, yes, yesssss…

Her hair rustles against the grass at her back and she looks up through the leaves of her sisters.

His head lies heavy on her breast as he calls her name, "Tatia," and then, "Katerina," and desperately, hopelessly, "Elena…"

He says, "I'm sorry, beloved."

She whispers, "I know." And it's almost enough. If her hair didn't rustle and her skin didn't rapes and her blood didn't move in her veins like amber. If he wasn't as much a monster as she's become. If Niklaus hadn't her loved her. If.

She thinks, "We could have been happy…"

He says, "I love you."

Tatia sighs, because he isn't speaking to her.

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Rebekah cries in her half-dead sleep, all the time. She hovers, oddly small, on the edge of true darkness and calls for her brothers. For Niklaus, who put her there, and Elijah, who left her there, and Finn, who has been there so long he's half forgotten living. She calls for Kol, and into the darkness, so soft it's barely a whisper, she calls despairingly, "Mother…"

Tatia is her mother sometimes, or at least, she thinks she is. Esther tells her that's what she's become, so Tatia goes to her, wraps her arms around the seed of Rebekah's soul and says, "Shh. It's all right, darling, it's all right. Everything is all right, I'm here."

She murmurs meaningless phrases in any one of a dozen languages and feels Rebekah's breath catch and she's clinging so tightly it becomes impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.

The hair under her fingers is golden, and the head is on her shoulder, not her chest, but it's still a comfort to touch, a comfort to hold. It's still a daughter she holds safe against the night.

It might be love, or something like it. It could have been love once.

She thinks, "We could have been sisters."

Rebekah whimpers, "Please don't go."

Tatia answers, "Hush now. Where would I go?"

"Mother…"

"Yes."

Rebekah dreams of a mother who holds her as though she is precious, one with kind words and slim, strong arms like wood. She dreams of a mother who didn't wait for her children to die to love them.

Esther watches but doesn't intervene and Tatia wants to ask, "Weren't you their mother once, too?"

Not anymore.

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Elijah is there and someone else. A woman with a soft voice who says, "Oh my god… Elijah… is this…?" There's a tremble in the tone and something like fear, or hope. It's hard to tell the difference sometimes.

"Yes."

"But how? Your mother killed her, didn't she?"

"She did, and used her blood, along with the essence of the white oak, to create us."

Tatia can smell salt and wishes she could see who is crying.

"The white oak did this to her?"

"My mother did this to her," he corrects. "That spell was wrought with her blood, and through it, her essence was bound to the essence of the tree."

"Can she hear us?" The woman's voice breaks and Tatia gets her answer as to who is crying. But that doesn't wound her nearly as much as Elijah's next words.

"I very much hope that she can't." He sounds so lost that for a moment she remembers why she watched him across the fields and used to smile. "For years, Niklaus and I tried to wake her. You've heard the story of Sleeping Beauty?"

The woman says, "Wow. I've never met a fairy tale before. Tell me about her."

So he does. He lies a little, or maybe she's been dreaming too long. And then he says a name she hasn't dared remember, a name she can't bring herself to know. The name of a dead girl.

"Her name was Oksana."

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Sometimes - every once in a great, long while when she isn't dreaming of monsters - she remembers love. Not too loudly, or too often, because she fears that if she clings too tightly it will escape her altogether. She remembers softly, in whispers, and grazes, and she hates every second because it always, always brings pain.

She remembers silky strands of hair sliding through her fingers, over and over until she can barely feel them. Soft skin. Velvet lips. A head, heavy and warm on her chest. She remembers days that pass too quickly and nights that last forever. She remembers tears, and laughter, and rage, and joy – a love so strong she felt it might kill her and so sweet she couldn't bring herself to care.

When those eyes found hers in the dark with naked fear, she felt sure she would kill for them; sure she would do anything, anything, to banish that fear. She remembers agony and an emptiness that never quite went away and a yawning, unspeakable terror that those eyes might close forever. She remembers lips on her breast and an ache in her chest and tiny fingers grasping at her hair.

Oh, yes, Tatia remembers love.

And she remembers how it ends.

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Mikael comes in her dreams as he came once before, with strong arms and a firm resolve. A hand claps over her mouth and she's screaming but no one can hear. A prelude, she knows now. A bad joke. She screams, and fights with all her strength, and it's just as futile as her efforts then. Dreams and memories and no difference between the two.

She remembers Esther, a blade in one hand and her fate in the other, saying, "Thank you for saving my family."

Tatia can only watch, then as now, as that blade pulls back before driving forward, sinking deep in her chest where love used to live, and into the silence where her heartbeat used to be, a panicked voice screaming, "Mother! Mother!"

She learned what pain really was when she heard that voice. Dying would have been preferable. Naturally, they denied her even that.

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Tatia dreams of a meadow that doesn't exist with a dead child running through it, dark hair streaming behind her and a smile that could outshine the sun. She can't remember the last time wind touched her hair, or the sun touched her skin. She can't remember when she didn't dream of the lightless dark around her roots or the monsters her children became.

The children her monsters destroyed.

Her lightless dark is filled with blood. If she could grow them, her leaves would sprout black as their hearts. No wonder the gods left her to this purgatory with nothing but demons and the ghost of a life. No wonder she's damned, as surely as they are.

She dreams of nothing, and it never lasts.

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Elijah is gone. The woman is not. She waits, because that is all she has left.

In an hour, or a minute, or a century, the woman leans forward, and silky strands brush across her skin. Soft hands comb back her hair. There is a knife in her chest and its twisting, shredding, and she knows it's love.

Here is her flesh, the piece of her soul she cast out, clothed in skin. Here is her body, her blood, her daughter, her love.

Her heart bursts open, the third time, and she reaches up, to touch that hair. The woman is against the wall and screaming for Elijah before she can blink, and they stare at one another, an image and its reflection.

When she looks into those dark eyes she sees fear. She would do anything, anything, to keep it at bay…

And then he is there, between them, and his eyes are full of something unspeakable. Hate and hope and love and fear and his arm held up, to shield… someone.

Someone else. Someone not Oksana.

He says, "Tatia?"

She turns her head away, looks at her hands, and cries, because this, too, is just another dream.

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_They'll get through__  
__They'll get you_  
_In the place that you feel it the most_  
_When you're cornered_  
_When it's forming_  
_In the place that you wish was a ghost_

Punching in a Dream || The Naked and Famous


	2. Chapter 2

_Nothing here is real, nothing here is right._  
_ I've been making shows of trading blows_  
_ just hoping no one knows_  
_ That I've been going through the motions_  
_ walking through the part._  
_ Nothing seems to penetrate my heart_

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It's not a dream. Or if it is, it's one from which she cannot wake.

She wonders if this is the newest incarnation of madness. Elijah is there. Sometimes the woman comes, Elena, and once, Niklaus. She doesn't speak to them. She's forgotten how. She's _afraid_ to. Because if she speaks, and this is real, then Oksana is really, truly gone.

She haunts the house she's found herself in, drifts through the rooms touching nothing. She takes nothing with her, leaves no trace behind, and time slips past her like rain. She isn't sure how long she's been there, but she thinks maybe, if she tries hard enough, she could still be sleeping.

One day she will stand up and her body will stay in the chair behind her. It will put down roots while she drifts on the winds. She will float out of it, away from this place, find Oksana and they'll dream forever of a field that no longer exists, a dead mother and her dead child.

There's another woman with her face. Doppelganger, Elijah called them. Saplings, she thinks, but this one is different. Elena, is strong, and soft, like willow wood. This one is fierce and cautious, and alive. She is a fire, burning against the dark.

Katherine, she tells her. Katerina, Elijah called her. Oksana, her heart cries.

Gone, comes the answer. Every time.

Others come, and sit, and wait. Others give her space, and time, as if she needs either. As if she hasn't had an eternity of both.

Katherine comes, and demands, and imposes. Katerina forces her to get up and go into the garden. She drags her to the bedroom to try on clothes. She pushes her out the door and into one of those metal boxes they call cars, and takes her into the world.

Tatia could stop her, easily. She can feel her own strength when Katherine pulls on her arm, and when Katerina throws clothes at her. Tatia's stronger, could be faster. All that time she's been asleep has made her powerful, but she doesn't, because in the roll of those impatient eyes, Tatia sees a glimmer of something lost.

When the wind blows through her hair she hears leaves, and when her skin rasps against metal it is the sound of bark against steel, but she feels her pores open and close, and the sun is warm on her face. There are children, and people, and her image is there.

She thinks, "Am I the reflection?"

When Katerina touches her arm, she feels the lick of flames, but these cause her heart to quicken. When Katherine stops, annoyed, and reaches out to straighten Tatia's hair, she breathes in her double's scent, soft and sweet, like her child's.

Is this what Oksana was, ages ago?

Tatia is many things, but not a fool. She knows that Elena and Katerina are her children, far, far removed. She knows that a spell gave them her face, that neither of them are like her, with lightless darks where their roots reach into the earth, yet she can't help but wonder if one of them is like Oksana.

Were they once tiny, dark haired waifs running through meadows with sunlight in their smiles? Was Oksana soft and strong, like willow wood? Did her eyes burn with that kind of fire? Was she this alive?

Katherine buys Tatia clothes with Elijah's money, and takes her back to his house, and says, "Be dressed when I come to get you tomorrow. Just mix and match. It'll be fine." And then without warning she's gone.

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Tatia does as she's told, because she wants to see her. Elijah watches as she comes down the stairs. His eyes are often on her, but this is different. She feels strangely vulnerable, as though she is manifest.

Elena is not there today and Tatia is grateful, because she can't allow herself to be touched again. That skin fooled her once, and she almost woke. What would a second touch do to her?

The fabric feels strange against her skin, both because in one of her lives she never wore clothes, and because in her other, the clothes were nothing like this. She's never worn trousers that cling to her legs, nor shirts that bare her arms and back. Her skin has never been this naked.

She stands in the unused sitting room, and she waits. She does not look at Elijah when he follows her, just lets the sun falls on her face feeling the heat sink in. She dreams she is not there, dreams so hard and so fierce that finally she isn't, and he goes away.

Time passes. She doesn't bother to count how much and until Katerina strolls in, looking terribly bored, heaves a sigh that sends dust flying in all directions - she always leaves a mark - and says, "Well, you're definitely an Original. I don't know how, but you managed to screw up that outfit. I'm not going out with you dressed like that."

Katherine treats her as though there is no question she is real, and present, and assailable. Katerina imposes reality by presence alone. She is not forceful, only insistent, and that is enough. It is too much. It is exactly what she needs and it becomes Tatia's dream of a life. She gets up, gets dressed - something she has grown better at, if Katherine is a good judge - and they go out. Sometimes to bars, others to shopping malls or outlet stores or public events. They spend Elijah's money, and men buy them dinner, and Katerina feeds on them, something that Tatia does not have to do, but something she discovers she can.

She doesn't have fangs. She uses her nails instead and her lightless dark fills with warm blood, hot and rich from the world's children.

Esther is right. Tatia truly is their mother.

It would be easy to fall back into dreams, in those moments, to drift away and leave her body behind. She could dream of the blood she's just taken, while away an aeon in the pleasant dark, but Katherine is impatient. "Can't you just compel him, already? We're late."

Late for what? But Tatia lets it go. Not important. Not crucial. Not like chasing the last ghost of Oksana in the glance Katerina throws over her shoulder, in the mischievous tilt of her chin. In Katherine's quiet insistence that Tatia's presence is not optional, it is assumed.

It's a pleasant dream of a life in its own right.

It doesn't last.

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Just because she does not speak, doesn't mean she can't understand.

Niklaus is home. Katerina runs, because that is what Katherine does.

Tatia waits. It's all she has now, but not all she does.

For a time, it confuses her, that she continues on, almost as if what Katerina did was plant a seed, and now that it has taken root, Tatia is helpless to stop it, but eventually she understands that Katherine's fire was a healing fire. It cauterized her wounds, and while it didn't heal the emptiness it stopped the hemorrhage. Katerina gave her the dream of a life.

Apparently it's called 'routine.'

Tatia gets up, gets dressed, something she does without outside opinion, and goes out. She walks the grounds, the woods, the streets and watches the people going about their lives.

Sometimes she feeds on them, because she is still a monster, if they seem interesting or catch her attention. If he's handsome. If her smile seems wicked. If they have long dark hair that streams behind them. If.

She just wants a little taste of that life. Just a little taste…

Elijah walks with her some days, in silence, waiting. He never imposes. He never did, not with her, and now that he would he's afraid to. She can see beneath the pride and the vainglorious clothing to the man he was. Is, maybe. She can see the truths he'd like to hide.

Just because she knows it's not a dream doesn't mean she can tell the difference.

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Esther walks with her, still, always. She can feel the witch, even if she cannot see her. There is a shadow to every step, an echo to her passing that says, "I am here. I am with you. You are not alone."

The words are not a reassurance, but a promise etched onto Tatia's soul. As if she needed reminding. As if she could forget the feeling of her leaves shuddering, and her skin rasping, and her pores opening and closing for the sun. As if she could forget her children burning her to ground, and then using her over and over again to drag one another to the edge of true darkness.

Esther watches, and judges, and hates. It's all she has now. It's all she can do. Esther has no dreams.

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Time passes. Tatia's not sure how much or if it matters, but she's either going mad again or becoming frightfully sane.

Everyday, she learns a little more, finds a new river, or a new alley, or a new dark-haired infatuation, but she always, always knows more than she should.

She knows that Katherine is in Missouri conning an old couple. She knows that Kol is in Moscow wining and dining socialites. She knows Elena is a little in love with Elijah and that Elijah is past the point of devotion and that they are both hopelessly lost in the sea of their lives.

Tatia finds her way to places she's never been, recognizes people she's never seen, knows the rose bush is thirsty while the azaleas are drowning and knows how to fix that despite never having kept an ornamental garden.

Niklaus visits more frequently, sits with her often, his eyes dark and his lips tight and the powerlessness of his position thrust upon him. There's a little spite in her silence, for Elijah, and Kol. For Finn, who dreamt so long he forgot how to live and for Rebekah, who cried and clung in the black to a mother she never had.

It's mostly for Rebekah, who hasn't come to see her and who Tatia will not go to see. She can't lose another daughter.

So when things there come to a head and Nik grabs her arm to force her to say something, to do something, she takes more pleasure than she should in the fact that she can lift him by his throat, toss him like a rag doll into the house and watch him crumple.

It's short-lived. Looking into his eyes as she plucks him from the ground is a tense moment, because she can see the pain, the despair of her rejection, the fear of his helplessness. There is a moment where she remembers being the victim in Mikael's sights and her heart shrieks with pity for the boy who lived under his terror.

Something in her rips and twists and tears.

She gives him something she hasn't given anyone since waking, and holds him against her chest, threads her fingers through his coarse, blonde hair. She says, "Nik-"

But he isn't that boy and she's not his mother, and when he runs she lets him go.

It's too much. The whole world, it's all too much.

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_Don't want to be..._  
_ going through the motions,_  
_ loosing all my drive_  
_ I can't even see, if this is really me_  
_ and I just want to be..._  
_ Alive!_

Going Through the Motions | Buffy Summers


	3. Chapter 3

_And I could hear the thunder and see the lightning crack_  
_And all around the world was waking, I never could go back_  
_'Cause all the walls of dreaming, they were torn wide open  
Finally seemed that the spell was broken  
And all my bones began to shake, my eyes flew open..._

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She gives Elijah the fright of his life when she walks into the kitchen and says, "What happened to Oksana?"

It might be one of the most beautiful things she's ever seen, the way he falls apart. He stares, open mouthed and terrified and has to swallow four times before he finds the breath to reply, "Tatia?"

She ignores him expertly, pays no mind to his pain. He has something she needs. (It's not cruelty, only the worst kind of indifference.) "What happened to my daughter, Elijah?"

He is himself, and marshals his fear. Courtesy, perhaps. Devotion, in another life. He tells her. Maybe he lies a little, when he can't remember.

She waits for the pain, for it to strike like a snake, quick and searing. Or to spread slow and horrible like the fire, clinging and eating and consuming until she crumbles.

She wonders if it's as beautiful to watch her last hope die as it was to watch his spring up. He's a monster, after all, and she is in such pain, because nothing happens. No sense of peace comes, no resolution, and as his words wash over her she knows he doesn't have the answers she needs. But worst of all, she knows that if he doesn't, no one will. No answers.

No resolution.

No peace...

When his fingers brush hers, she looks into his eyes and sees love. Not the kind they could have shared as humans, not the love he feels for his family, but a love that spans all the years of their lives. Companionship, constancy, endurance. He lets her see how deeply he's felt her distance since waking. He shows her something real.

She doesn't pull away.

He asks again, "Tatia?"

And she answers, "No." Then adds, "Not yet."

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Nik finds her in the garden planting an ash, elbow deep in the soil and dirt on her face. If she can't bury herself in the ground and take sustenance she might as well live vicariously, taste her dream in another's soul. She's ready to ignore him, to pretend he isn't haunting her days, but she forgets all about the little tree with its fragile branches when he speaks.

"If I asked you to kill me, would you?"

The shock is enough that her hands go still, a shuddering, writhing thing taking root in her belly. It might be horror. She doesn't look at him, keeps her eyes fixed firmly on the black earth when she answers, "Do you want me to?"

His laugh grates against her ears like a scream. "I don't know." And then more quietly, so quiet she almost thinks it's the wind, he says, "Elena is dead."

She waits, expecting to feel something, anything – for her heart to shriek and the memories to swamp her like a deluge – but all that comes is the queasiness from before – the panic, she realizes, comprehending the feeling. She's felt that before, when Oksana disappeared at the market. It's a feeling she hasn't had in so long she's nearly forgotten what it is.

It comes with love.

The panic twists for different reasons, then, as his words take meaning. When was the last time before this that words meant anything real?

He paces, speaking more normally, but the pain echoes in the hall of his throat. "I've got a handful of hybrids, a few blood bags, but the doppelgangers are done. The Petrova line is finished. They'll all die, one by one, and then what will I have?"

There are things she should say to comfort him, to remind him what he has to live for - his family, his (precious few) friends, that girl who likes horses - but she thinks of Oksana and discards all of it. None of those people will make him any less alone. Not really.

Tatia looks at her hands, her long fingers with blood under the nails and says, "My daughter is dead."

She doesn't say, "In all the world there is no other like me." But when she looks up and their eyes meet, she knows he heard it anyway.

He doesn't say, "Nor me," but he does swallow, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down like the tightness in her chest. It pulls her gaze to his throat, and the hot, rich blood that must taste like eternity. Could she rip out that throat? Actually cover herself in blood, bury her hands in the searing heat of him and pull out his heart? Could she listen to his breath sigh through her hair? (Would it rustle, if it was his?)

"Would it work?" he asks tightly - so hopeful, and so, so afraid.

But of which answer?

Tatia searches herself for the truth. Vaguely she can feel Esther, shrieking and howling with the urge to destroy. Tatia looks deeper for the edges of the tree, surprised and not surprised to find nothing where it used to live. At last there is no separation. They have grown together, she and the tree, become one. She is the white oak and she knows without a shadow of a doubt that she could kill him, and he would stay dead.

The aching void inside her for Oksana spreads like rot. It latches onto the healthy tissue, burrows farther into her dead heart until she's hollow, carved out to make room for an endless grief that's all the more terrible for its silence. This is not the raging, angry grief that cuts its mistress over and over again until she heals. This is not the howling storm. This is the quiet grief of survival that time should heal but won't.

Not for her. Not for him.

One day her body will stand up and she will stay crouched in the dirt. It will go on without her, just a shell, her soul scorched out by so much longing.

But not today, she finds, turning to face him. And for one brief instant she rests her hand against his chest to feel the life inside.

He thinks she's going to kill him right there and he wants death almost as badly as he wants a reason to live. She gives him something she also gave Elijah. (The truth.)

"Yes," she tells him, feeling the hole inside widen at the very thought. A little more of her burns away in the silence that follows.

His eyes are dark and full of trembling fear when he breathes, "Would you? If I asked?" It sounds very much like he's asking now, but she doesn't think he is. He's asking something completely different, something deep and harrowing and real.

The fear in his eyes looks like hope. It's still hard to tell the difference, if there even is one.

She offers him a smile. It's watery, thin, and her voice cracks when she tries to say, "Only if you'll kill me, too."

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Here is her secret: she's still not awake, not really. She's as likely to drift down the hall remembering Mikael as she is to take Rebekah shopping; as likely to chase the ghost of Oksana in a slim dark throat as to walk with Elijah or let Katerina bully her into buying that dress. As likely to talk with Elena, slow and steady, words falling between them like stones in a well, as to lose herself in the dream of fire.

She still feels Esther and bleeds clear as often as crimson. She's still not always there to answer when they ask, "Tatia?" But sometimes she is, and that's different, it's new, and it's because of him.

He isn't insistent. He doesn't take her participation for granted, or assume that she will be there to meet the touch of his hands. He can't assume she lives in her flesh because sometimes she still doesn't and he has to wait – a raw mess of a man – until she comes back.

When she blinks to find herself face to face with his deepest fears, she pulls him to her breast and holds tight enough to hurt. She sees the doubt in his eyes beside the smile on his face and knows she would do anything, anything, to banish it.

With sweat and skin and teeth, she presses them together until he knows without question that she is real and alive and she proves it with the feel of her spread out beneath him, the taste of her blood on his tongue. When she asks, he tells her she tastes like salt and sap and time. He still tastes like eternity, but he tastes a little bit like home now, too.

It keeps her coming back, keeps her striving to be there knowing that he's waiting. When she dreams of fire, she remembers the heat of his skin. When she chases Oksana she thinks of him darting after them in the fields. When she remembers Mikael, she remembers the boy who feared him as well.

One day, Klaus will ask her to kill him. The loneliness, the empty ache of what could have been will be too much. She knows because she feels it, too. One day, she'll bury her hands in his chest to hold his heart, and on that day she'll let him do the same. Sometimes she dreams of what it will feel like, his long fingers sliding past her ribs; those big hands inside her tiny chest.

She can't be sure it will kill her if he rips her heart out, but at the very least they can try. She has a few ideas if it doesn't. Throwing herself into a volcano, maybe, or getting Katherine to literally rip her to pieces. If all else fails she can drift away, leave her body to its tasks and dream again the dreams she dreamt before.

One day she will find death and a true peace, but not today. Today, she will try again to wake up.

.

.

.

_No more dreaming of the dead as if death itself was undone_  
_No more calling like a crone for a boy, for a body in the garden_  
_No more dreaming like a girl so in love, so in love  
No more dreaming like a girl so in love, so in love  
No more dreaming like a girl, so in love with the wrong world_

Blinding || Florence + the Machine


End file.
